[jer0me]

> We use static-tailwind, a version with no build step, in development.

https://github.com/tonyennis145/dumb-tailwind/

Is it this? (A 3.9 MB CSS file?)

My personal gripe with build steps is not the build step itself, rather the unreliability of the JavaScript ecosystem and the often head-scratchingly opaque error messages.

Build steps such as a hypothetical `css-compile` don't address limitations of browsers, but limitations of network connections that may struggle to download (and frankly, at 3.9 MB, devices that struggle to parse) large amounts of CSS and JavaScript.

Even if browsers can download multiple files at once, they can't download files they don't know about, which is why ES modules in the browser haven't taken off as a way to eliminate the build step.